What this country needs is a new fraternal organization, a social club for millions of Americans who have something in common.
Namely, being cancelled, banned or suspended from one form of social media or another.
If all these victims, people like you and me, banded together, we might have a larger membership than the Elks, the Knights of Columbus, or the AARP.
This thought occurred to me last week when Vivek Ramaswamy, a longshot Republican candidate for president, announced that he had been summarily tossed off LinkedIn.
His crime? Putting out “misleading or inaccurate information,” including a reference to “climate religion,” which it quite clearly is. He was also flagged for his assertion that “fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity” – a fact which will certainly be proven correct once we are deprived of them by the… climate religion.
Ramaswamy is said to be worth more than $600 million. You’d think this is just the sort of fat cat that LinkedIn would want on its site. But no. He had engaged in “thoughtcrime,” to use the Orwellian term.
When his campaign complained, Big Brother granted him “another chance” — to repent his heresies, his back-sliding. But when he raised a ruckus, LinkedIn said they had “restricted in error.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
How many times do you read about things like this happening, but only to Republicans or conservatives? You probably know someone, if not yourself, who’s ended up in, say, Facebook jail, for some random thoughtcrime.
The honorary chairman of this new organization – shall we call it the Banned Band? – would have to be former president Donald J. Trump, who at the time he was thrown off Twitter had 88 million followers.
Elon Musk has since offered Trump a chance to return but he has his own Truth Social platform now. I can’t even keep track of all the other social media that have banned POTUS, or restored him, or whatever.
But he’s not the only billionaire who’s run afoul of the Thought Police. Think J.K. Rowling, the British author of the Harry Potter books. Her crime is being able to define what a woman is, even though she’s not a biologist.
Being in the BB is like being an actual criminal back in the old days, pre-Internet. Sometimes you’re in custody, or you’re on parole, or taking it on the lam. Or you’re plotting your next crime, I mean, tweet.
During the Panic, I was repeatedly banned from YouTube. I used to have an ophthalmologist from Colorado on my radio show. We would discuss COVID – no conspiracy theories, just the government’s own statistics.
The next day I’d be thrown off for two weeks. Then I’d be put on probation or something. A month or so later, I’d have the doctor back on, and it’d be the same thing all over again. I was under YouTube arrest. Finally, I went over the wall and fled to Rumble. No more problems.
I had the ophthalmologist on my show recently and said I’d had other problems as well with the Thought Police.
“Me too,” he said. “I got reported to the state medical licensing board.”
This is why Banned Band – or whatever name we come up with — would be such a great organization. Everyone could all get together and swap lies, only they wouldn’t be lies.
We could have clubhouses – call them posts – in every village and town. Talk about inclusion — it would be a group that cuts across all demographic, social and income levels.
After World War II, until well into the Seventies, it seemed like most political yard signs had one word under the candidate’s name: VETERAN.
It was the sine qua non to run for office – military experience. Those days are long gone, but now you could identify candidates with the words BB.
Just like there are all kinds of military ranks and personnel, BB would have all sorts of different memberships. Take Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri He lost a big book contract on the grounds of non-wokeness. Hawley’s experience definitely qualifies him for post commander in BB.
These are all the machinaations of the uber-left Deep State Democrats. Bans and cancellations are only part of it. How about the swattings – calling in fake reports to 911 to hassle MAGA types? Or doxxing – publicizing the personal details of anyone who deviates from the woke orthodoxy, like Libs of Tik Tok?
When the Twitter files started coming out, I scanned them avidly. I wanted the social cachet of Making It. And I knew that at least once I’d had a tweet banned. I’d tweeted out an FBI report from 1960. It was about Nancy Pelosi’s father, then the mayor of Baltimore, being mobbed up.
The ban perplexed me. On the one hand, it made a Democrat look bad – an Internet felony, obviously. Conversely, however, it came from the FBI – the Democrats’ own Stasi. So it must have been true, right?
The investigation of the Twitter files was being done by Matt Taibbi, whose father Mike used to be a reporter at the old Channel 7, two ownerships ago.
I was disappointed not to make the files, but then I got a direct message from Matt:
“Did you know you’d been flagged by the ADL for retweeting a post-election story from Red State with the caption:
“Very Odd: Michigan Found Over 100,000 Ballots and Every Single One of Them Has Joe Biden’s Name on It.”
Was that story ever retracted? And why was the Anti-Defamation League flagging me about it?
So I made it! I’m eligible to join BB. Of course, I already had my YouTube scars as well. Also, I survived a political audit from the IRS, back when I was working at Channel 7. I reported on some federal grand jury transcripts in a corruption trial involving my state rep from Somerville.
The next morning, a prosecutor who is now a federal judge came up to me in the courtroom. He asked if I still lived in Somerville. A few days later I got notice of a “random” audit.
I thought about mentioning that to Matt Taibbi, to show that I already had my own bona fides. But now he can trump my IRS story as well.
Taibbi discovered that the Deep State had opened an audit file on him last Christmas Eve – a Saturday! And then two months ago, an IRS agent had shown up at his house on the very same day he was testifying before Congress.
So I guess when our local BB Post opens, I’ll have to buy the first round for Taibbi. He has better Deep State war stories than I do.